Trinity Missionary Church in New London is honoring five people as part of a Black History program Feb. 24, and we are able to gather four of them: attorney Lonnie Braxton, funeral home owner Lester Gee, prison ministry leader Winston Taylor and local businessman Bill Cornish. We also talk about the fifth honoree, longtime United Way Food Center employee Sara Louis Chaney.

Built originally in 1868, the Ocean House in Watch Hill attracts thousands of visitors every year for its upscale dining not far from Taylor Swift’s beachside residence. Now a new hardcover book by Ocean House events manager Lauren DiStefano tells its story.

Dirk Langeveld tells the story of millionaire Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, the most infamous draft dodger of the Great War and one of America’s first airplane pilots (he trained under the Wright Brothers), who made a daring escape from U.S. custody and used fake identities to flee from Canada to Germany, where he survived two kidnapping attempts only to return to the United States in ignominy just before WWII.

Mystic Seaport historian Fred Calabretta takes us on a high-seas adventure as he delves into the fascinating world of 19th-century whaling, particularly the largely untold story of black whalers in New London.

Author Ken Kesey talks about his new book, “A Pictorial Journal of Ocean Beach Park,” recalling the New London beach’s early days as a fun spot for the wealthy, along with its evolution into a honky-tonk area and then, after the Hurricane of 1938, its transformation into a public park.

Tom Callinan of Norwich, the first official state troubadour, takes us on a musical journey through two centuries of American history, including songs about the first submarine built in Connecticut and a famed dog from WWI.

Everyone knows about Norwich’s claim to the Revolutionary War’s biggest traitor, but City Historian Dale Plummer tells tales of the Wauregan, where President Lincoln once stayed, as well as a secret burial ground in Norwichtown and efforts to restore a WWI cannon.

Eighty-eight-year-old James Mosely of Waterford, the first African-American medical corpsman to go through the Navy’s nuclear training school, remembers the day when the U.S. military was desegregated and tells about being part of a Library of Congress history project.